Chiara Camoni

Between Sisters

My mother is bad.
It is something that cannot be said.
My mother is bad.
I'll get on a horse and go against her.

I think the time has come to dedicate a work to my mother. Against my mother.
A public proclamation, a revenge, the breaking of a taboo.

If I had had a better mother, I certainly wouldn’t have become an artist.

Yet again a deity.
At my home. Good and bad.
It is not possible to stay in the shadows.
Staying in the shadow for too long.

Containers and Other Facts

Rome. An afternoon at Villa Giulia, at the Etruscan Museum.
I get lost in an infinite succession of rooms. One is dedicated to the “gift” and catches my attention because
it was just what I was already thinking.
[The first epigraphic evidence dates back to the seventh century BC and describes now codified rituals concerning
the practice of giving, aimed at establishing family, political and economic relationships.]

At some point the object speaks.
“I am from... from...”
“I'm from Avile, the jug.”
“I am the olla of Scuria, beautiful of a beautiful.”
And so on.

The container is not silent.
The container is not even empty. Or rather it is full of emptiness.

Chiara Camoni

“When I proceed with the clay strips, from bottom to top, I repeat one of the oldest gestures in the history of humanity, probably the first sculptural form: a hollow and a convex space, a full and an empty space. I have the feeling of building the whole universe. I love the ability of statues to become a simulacrum, to become something other than the materials they are made of”, the artist writes.

Il tronco e il trapezio (The trunk and the trapeze) is a large sculpture composed of different elements and created with the help of other women who lend their skills to the artist: in this case Paola Aringes, weaver, and Silvia Perotti, sculptor. These are collaborations that precede the entry into the studio and that continue in life. A meeting where the gestures of everyday life and that of the study are in continuity.

The first step in creating this sculpture was the identification of a trunk in the woods, which was then taken inside the studio, sculpted and equipped with two eyes made of carved bone.

Then a cloak, ornament or ritual dress was woven with sheep’s wool. Placed at the foot of the statue, it delimits the relevant space, but starting from this exhibition it also functions as a sort of carpet on which the work is placed by another artist, to further complicate the notion of authorship that this sculpture shuns and also to contaminate it with another time.

If the great mother carved in wood speaks to us an archaic language, the tennis shoes, subjected by Lucia Leuci, like the other objects belonging to this series, to an operation of domestic alchemy, are part of everyday life and its contradictions (and also its irony).

Knowing how to welcome what is unexpected, monstrous and grotesque in the world and recognizing it in us helps us to acquire a fuller and more complete vision of ourselves.

Chiara Camoni’s self-portraits are full-length, scale drawings in which the artist portrayed herself without ever taking her eyes off the mirror, and never looking at the sheet. We can imagine them as some sort of private performance, but also and above all as the assumption of a point of view on oneself.

Everything is missing from the self-portrait as a genre – the pose, the declaration of poetics that is always underlying it, the claim of dignity. The drawn body seems to convey different points of view, it is an open body, which is represented, over time, changing and monstrous and fearless – also, for this reason, extremely beautiful.